Description
Book SynopsisImmigration and globalization have significantly altered Europe's cultural and ethnic landscape, foregrounding questions of national belonging. This title provides an ethnographic analysis of how patterns of national identity are constructed and transformed across generations.
Trade Review“
Blood and Culture is an extremely important ethnographic account of a phenomenon that is often examined in a quantitative or theoretical manner. Cynthia Miller-Idriss talks to working-class German youth—high-school students in the process of studying for a ‘trade’—and elicits from them their experience of what it means to be German in a country that is increasingly diverse and where the memory of World War II can no longer serve as an ‘excuse’ for not expressing national pride. She makes a convincing case that nation-ness differs not only across nations but across generations within the same nation-state.”—
Mabel Berezin, author of
Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe“In this rare work on ‘everyday’ understandings of citizenship and nationhood, Cynthia Miller-Idriss helps to dispel stereotypes about allegedly ‘blood’-based and ‘racial’ ideas of German nationhood. She shows that ordinary people (even those particularly suspected to hold ‘racial’ ideas, such as working-class youth), espouse a cultural and behavioral, rather than biological, idea of nation. Moreover, in making generational experience key to national self-conceptions, she proposes a dynamic, change-centered notion of nationhood.”—
Christian Joppke, author of
Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal StateTable of ContentsPreface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations xvii
Introduction: Citizenship and National Belonging as Cultural Practices 1
1. Who Belongs to the Nation? 23
2. Being and Becoming in Germany 46
3. Germany's Forbidden Fruit: National Pride and National Taboos 63
4. Raising the Right Wing: Educators' Struggle to Confront the Radical Right 93
5. Teaching and Un-teaching National Identity 122
6. Blood, Culture, Birthplace 149
7. Generational Change and the Re-Imagining of Nations 169
Appendix A. Overview of the Case Studies 182
Appendix B. Methodological Overview 188
Notes 201
Bibliography 207
Index 229
